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Vaccine or virus? We must act on ash Wednesday

When Dutch elm disease killed 20m trees in the early 1970s and transformed the
landscapes painted by Constable and Gainsborough, the official view was that
the strain of fungus that had reappeared from America was so aggressive that
nothing could be done. Today, as our ash trees face a potentially greater
threat, we should remember that not everyone accepted that view.

One independent spirit was Lord de Ramsey, who loved the mature elm trees on
his Abbots Ripton estate in Cambridgeshire and decided to fight the fungus
by injecting his trees every year with fungicide. The estate still has
hundreds of mature elms whose survival feels almost magical. There are even
more elms, about 17,000, in Brighton and Hove, which sit in a bowl protected
by the South Downs and the sea. In the early 1970s the council introduced a
programme, which is still going, to eradicate Dutch elm disease. The council
has